Traffic Engineered (TE) networks have a variety of mechanisms to facilitate the separation of the data plane and control plane. They also have a range of management and provisioning protocols to configure and activate network resources. These mechanisms provide technologies for enabling flexible and dynamic networking. Abstraction of network resources is a technique that can be applied to a single network domain or across multiple domains to create a virtualized network that is under the control of a network operator or the customer of the operator that actually owns the network resources.
Abstraction and Control of Traffic Engineered Networks (ACTN) describes a set of management and control functions used to operate one or more TE networks to construct virtual networks that can be represented to customers and that are built from abstractions of the underlying TE networks so that, for example, a link in the customer's network is constructed from a path or collection of paths in the underlying networks.